Can the Center Hold?
It’s a worn-out trope by now to conjure yet again Yeats’s immortal poem, yet perhaps forgivable if we dissect its most famous phrase, “the center cannot hold.” Because exactly what we mean by “the center,” and how we determine what holds it together, may answer the question of how we might do exactly that.
As it is, one example of the “center” is millions of friendships that remain strong, held between left-of-center pro-business Democrats who are skeptical about MAGA, and right-of-center Republicans who believe MAGA policies are the best route to our country achieving goals we all share: broadly distributed prosperity and an affordable middle-class lifestyle.
But those friendships are fraying. A few days ago, I spoke with an old friend from college. For more than 40 years, despite living in different cities, we’ve kept in touch. In earlier times by phone, in recent years with calls and texts, and over the decades through in-person reunions, usually with other friends from school. And in all those years, I never heard him speak about politics the way he did this time.
The equanimity and mutual respect that have defined our friendship withstood the first round of Trump-oriented polarization in 2016. It survived again in 2020 and again in November 2024. Throughout those years, as Trump established his legacy, I could speak with him about politics, and we would recognize that each of us had legitimate points of view. We disagreed on many issues but found common ground on others. Nothing we discussed ever threatened our friendship.
That wasn’t the case with so many former friends. If you’ve lived long enough, you may have eventually formed dozens of long-term friendships. I certainly did, but in 2016 I lost about 30 percent of them, mostly hardcore partisan Democrats. During the more recent years through 2024, I lost several more, mostly those who found themselves appalled at the January 6 “insurrection.” In every case, merely refusing to categorically denounce Donald Trump was reason enough for them to determine they could no longer be my friend.
Now the polarization has further intensified. And it was mystifying, yet again, for me to find yet another person who was intelligent, informed, and—at least so I thought—interested in following the truth wherever it would take them, ranting about President Trump and the alleged descent of fascism without a shred of nuance.
When faced with this fairly generic but apoplectic rant, I tried to calm the discourse, saying, “I always try to see both sides on these issues.” That response, along with the always worth trying “Well, they’re all crooks, no matter what party they’re in,” used to work at least as often as it failed. But it is becoming ineffective.
“There is only one side,” my friend thundered in response. “You have supported the GOP, and the GOP isn’t trying to stop Trump, and you will be on the wrong side of history.”
At this point, I was in a position that many of us have found ourselves in, again and again. Should I respond?
Yes, ICE agents wear masks, but that’s because a well-funded, fanatical leftist militia has mobilized flash mobs that spit in their faces, spray toxins on them, and photograph them so they can be identified and confronted when they’re off duty.
Yes, as Sasha Stone recently wrote on her Substack, we have “ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children,” but, as she goes on, “You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed.”
Yes, in some cases, ICE agents have violated the constitutional rights of American citizens, but aren’t incidents like that inevitable when our borders were thrown open, and ten million foreigners poured into the country for four years? We allowed these millions to enter the nation without any due process whatsoever, and the system is overwhelmed. We just give up?
And yes, ICE agents are rounding up criminal aliens on the street or even in homes, but isn’t that because mayors and governors have declined to turn criminal aliens over to ICE when they are convicted of a crime and instead release them into the community?
Instead of asking these questions and countless other questions that ought to be considered reasonable, I had a choice to make. Be silent, and maybe avoid losing another friend, or speak up, and be dehumanized and discarded forever.
This is not a trivial choice. Losing friendships between people who still find areas of agreement and mutual respect is not something to be rationalized away with some reassuring cliché such as “if that’s all it takes to end a friendship, then this person wasn’t your friend to begin with.” Nor should we conclude that every friend we lose to what we smugly refer to as Trump Derangement Syndrome is some fragile, innately troubled soul who just needed a slight push to go off the deep end.
No. Because what we have today are millions of people who revile not just President Trump, but half of the entire American population. They have decided that half the country is filled with people who are either incredibly stupid or incredibly evil. Or both, of course.
And to further clarify the point: These are not people who (paraphrasing Yeats) “lack all conviction,” and they are not “the worst… filled with passionate intensity.” But what did happen to them?
Is it the influence of social media that rewards hyperbolic negativity? Is it the endless flood of indigestible content that saturates us, pulling us into an algorithmically curated miasma that provokes nonstop outrage and, ultimately, despair? Does that account for TDS?
It would be ridiculous to say Trump supporters haven’t returned the favor. Scorn has been exchanged equally. But in the actions on the street, I struggle to find parity. The TDS contingent points to the January 6 riots, a single-day event, but they ignore the mobs that burned down cities from Minneapolis to Portland for the entire preceding summer. They ignore how those mobs have now evolved into trained militias that are in open rebellion against federal power. And they believe brazen lies about Trump, from his “good people on both sides” statement to his alleged mocking a handicapped reporter, even to the claim that he callously overfed a Japanese koi during a state visit.
Those are early examples of what has happened almost every day for more than ten years. Portraying Trump in the worst possible light has been a full-time job for the American media. Invariably, when another slur is released by the media, watch the entire press conference or speech instead of just the carefully selected slur. You will find these biased “journalists” lie through their teeth, always picking the lowlights, always inventing a negative context. Sure, President Trump can stray from his chosen topic of the day to perseverate over the election of 2020 or claim the war in Ukraine would have never happened if he’d been in office. He goes off message. He’s willing to offend his opponents. He’s rough around the edges.
What Trump is not, however, is the next Hitler. In my recent conversation, I was told that conditions in America are nearly identical to those in Germany in the early 1930s and that Nazism is on the rise. This is ridiculous. The Nazis in pre-war Germany were veterans of the most horrific slaughter in world history. Millions of their friends died in the trenches of WW1, mowed down by machine guns or asphyxiated en masse from poison gas. Then these Germans returned to a dismembered nation experiencing 50 percent unemployment, where currency wasn’t merely inflated; it was worthless. There is no comparison whatsoever to the psychology of the Nazis, who terrorized the German population and the collective psyche of the American MAGA movement. But not for the first time, that’s what I heard.
Do I dare reply? Is there any room left for a rebuttal without causing a permanent break? And if so, how? What words of common sense can make a successful approach through the panic and the anger? What antidote exists to preserve one more endangered thread of friendship that holds together the American center?
Could it be Trump’s policies? Don’t all Americans share the goals that drive these policies? If they succeed, will they stitch the nation back towards unity? Will they solidify the center? To pull through this latest round of polarization, we have to restore efficiency to our bureaucracies and productivity to our industries, and to do this, our institutions require an overhaul. If we examine our choices, it is only a bit of a stretch to say we have Trump as our example on the right and Nicolás Maduro on the left. Venezuela is Exhibit A for how “affordability” mingled with class resentment that devolved into a tyranny that actually does begin to compare to WW2-era Nazism. I’ll take Trump, thank you very much.
Here are some hard realities that must inform serious nations:
– The machinery of government has to be operated by people chosen for competence, not some group “identity.”
– The economic model for the nation can’t be based merely on expanding the population.
– Broadly distributed prosperity depends on competitive capitalism, not a hyper-regulatory state that has the ironic effect of killing smaller corporations and consolidating power in only the biggest monopolistic players.
– Environmentalism has to be balanced with growth, or you end up with an authoritarian regime where monopolies control energy, water, and land.
– Homeless people are best served by cost-effective congregate facilities where they are required to remain sober in exchange for food and shelter.
– Immigrants have to be able to support themselves without government assistance.
– Able-bodied people receiving welfare must be required to work.
– New home permits have to include single-family dwellings on raw land, and not just “infill,” because there isn’t room within existing cities to increase supply enough to lower prices.
– Affordable energy cannot be achieved if you shut down a natural gas power plant every time a big solar/battery complex gets built, nor can we do it without nuclear power and petroleum, and only the market can tell us if and when we can stop using those fuels.
Adhering to these policies will restore prosperity and opportunity to all Americans. It will revitalize the nation, and the result will be a center that can hold. This is an America whose best days are yet to come.
It is an impolitic, fractious, friendship-ending thing to say, but right now, in 2026, these policies are only realized through President Trump. If President Biden had adopted these policies, I would have considered voting for him. But instead, we had pugnacious Joe Biden pretending he’d “beat the hell out of Donald Trump.” We had creepy Joe Biden in the summer of 2024, standing against a backdrop of black drapery and red lights, flanked by soldiers standing at attention, shaking his fists while giving a speech about “saving democracy.” We had anarchy in the streets and on the border, while Biden’s West Wing was packed with pandering clowns whose rhetoric would make Maduro proud.
To observe all of this is necessary and doesn’t mean that we, too, think there is only one side. But we must stick up for the side we believe in. With patience and empathy, we have to explain our position. We have to be polite and persistent and hope, one thread at a time, that the center will hold.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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